The Student Voice Prize 2024
Open for entries!
What is The Student Voice Prize?
The Student Voice Prize is an annual, international essay competition that raises the profile of rare diseases within the medical field, particularly with medical students, nurses and scientists who may have never come across rare diseases in their training.
Beacon and Medics4RareDiseases host the competition together and the winning essay is published in The Orphanet Journal of Rare Diseases!
Patient pairing is open:
2nd October – 30th October
The competition is opens for entries:
2nd October – 13th November
Why rare diseases?
Rare diseases affect approximately 350 million people worldwide and still, they’re some of the most difficult conditions to diagnose.
Despite the large number of people affected, little time is dedicated to rare diseases in medical school. The Student Voice Prize challenges the doctors, nurses and scientists of tomorrow to think about rare diseases today. After all, with a lifetime risk of 1 in 17 in the UK, it’s not rare to come across them!
How does it work?
Each year The Student Voice Prize team poses three questions centred around rare diseases and the patient experience to medical students, nurses and anyone who will be working in healthcare in the future.
These questions encourage the students to consider not only the scientific and medical side of rare diseases but also the impact on patients and families, including their mental as well as physical health, all with the aim of encouraging a more holistic view of healthcare and rare diseases.
What makes this competition unique?
The Patient Pairing Scheme
The patient pairing scheme was introduced to The Student Voice Prize six years ago.
It’s a unique feature of the competition which allows students to have a conversation with a rare disease patient or advocate.
Giving them the opportunity to learn first-hand about a rare condition and to gain an understanding of the patient experience, leading them to write a higher quality and more informed essay.
The scheme also has huge benefits for participating patient groups as they are able to advocate for their rare condition and share their experience with the medical professionals of the future!
The prizes
- The competition winner will be published in the world-renowned Orphanet Journal of Rare Diseases!
- Runners-up essays will be featured in blog format on Springer Nature’s Research Communities website.
- Cash prizes
- Dedicated shortlist for students whose first language is not English
The Student Voice Prize is proudly sponsored by…
Emotive
The rare disease community deserve the best support. Emotive is a global medical communications agency who partner with life science companies to help reduce the diagnostic odyssey, enhance community engagement and improve health outcomes for those suffering from a rare disease.
Working across medical & scientific affairs, brand & patient engagement and PR & advocacy, we are all driven by the desire to transform lives by inspiring change that has a positive impact on health. Using key insights gathered from ten years working on multiple rare disease global product launches, including advanced therapies, our team of over 70 scientific, creative and digital experts based in the UK and US provide the very best medical communications guidance and support in this challenging area.
We are also very proud of our ongoing pro-bono work with Medics4RareDiseases (M4RD), providing commercial, creative and strategic expertise to support their mission of raising awareness of rare diseases within the medical curriculum and profession.